


Flaky Forecast

by RoseisaRoseisaRose



Series: Everyday I'm Drabbling [17]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Gratuitous Hand Holding, I guess blue lions route assuming petra joined, and a half-cup of homesickness just because, annette and mercedes being gal pals, attempted jacket-lending, first snow, pre timeskip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:08:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25654927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseisaRoseisaRose/pseuds/RoseisaRoseisaRose
Summary: Petra stays up to see the first snowfall of the year. She underestimates the cold and Ashe’s kindness.Written for the Felannie discord drabble challenge; this week's prompt was "First Experiences."
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic & Mercedes von Martritz, Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert/Petra Macneary
Series: Everyday I'm Drabbling [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1649380
Comments: 20
Kudos: 48
Collections: Those Who Drabble in the Dark





	Flaky Forecast

Petra was good at predicting when it was going to rain. The air felt differently, even days beforehand, and the animals were restless if you knew what to look for. Even after moving away from Brigid, she had been able to tell with a fair amount of accuracy when they might have a thunderstorm that evening, or rain all the next day. It had been a fun, meaningless trick, one that had impressed Dorothea and Bernadetta, and, later, had impressed Annette and Mercedes. Secretly, she enjoyed answering questions instead of asking them, enjoyed knowing something that seemed like magic to her wide-eyed friends when they came down to class the next day in the pouring rain, looking at her like she was a genius.

She looked at them with the same wide eyes, she was sure, when they talked about the incoming snow.

“How are you knowing this?” she’d asked Annette, who was busy spreading an astonishing amount of jam on her toast with dinner. “Did you see it from the sky?”

“Hm? Oh no, I don’t know anything,” Annette said, taking a bite which demolished half the slice of toast in one fell swoop. “The gatekeeper told me. He usually knows things like that.”

“I’ll unpack my flannel nightgown, I suppose,” Mercedes said with a sigh, resting her chin on her hand. “I thought winter would come later; we’re so far south down here.” She looked over at Petra, suddenly concerned. “Do you have warm clothes to wear to bed, Petra?” she asked, her eyes wide. “Our school uniforms are plenty warm, but it can get quite cold at night. Do you have extra blankets?”

Mercedes often followed her around with questions like that; which made being the newest transfer student easier in some ways and harder in others. At the moment, Petra overlooked the questions entirely, asking one of her own in lieu of an answer.

“What time will it be happening, the snow?” she asked. She took a sip of her tea, tried to keep her voice casual.

Annette raised her eyebrows in surprise, her mouth full of the remaining half of the toast. “Iunno,” she said, her voice muffled slightly. She swallowed. “He just said ‘tonight.’ Midnight, maybe?”

“I would like to be seeing it,” Petra said thoughtfully. “Maybe I will wait up for it.”

“Then you _definitely_ need warm clothes,” Mercedes said. “Do you have a scarf?”

“The school uniform has much warmth,” Petra protested, but Mercedes only frowned more deeply at this.

“At least tell me you have a nice winter coat you can wear if you’re going out at night,” she said solemnly. Petra frowned this time. She had the formal jacket that was required as part of the school uniform, but she rarely wore it. That would surely do. But when she told Mercedes this, the girl only shook her head. But as she put her fork down across her now-empty plate, she gave Petra a broad smile.

“I’m sure we can fix that,” she said.

***

And so Petra sat on the wall lining the gardens, waiting her fourth hour for the snow to fall. She wore three jackets, two scarves, a knitted hat with a rather oversized pom-pom holding it together at the top, and something that Annette had termed “mittens,” which were like gloves, but useless. It was the nicest thing Annette and Mercedes could have possibly done for her, short of offering to stay up with her and watch for the snow, which they both steadfastly refused to do with identical shivers, standing outside their dorm rooms in their sensible flannel pajamas and waving her off before retreating to tea and blankets and gossip.

They were awfully nice in a lot of ways, but they didn’t solve a few fundamental problems.

First, she had no one to sit with, and no one to see the snow with, and after hour two or so she would have liked someone to be excited with her.

Second, they had been tragically, regrettably correct: It was cold to sit on a stone wall in the dark in winter. She couldn’t feel her toes, or her nose, or her ears. She could feel her fingers and her fingers were cold. All the scarves in the world wouldn’t make the world warmer.

Third, there was no snow. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for – flakes that fell from the sky, she was told, which sounded downright apocalyptic, but which everyone seemed remarkably calm about. But she was sure she hadn’t missed them and she wasn’t sure they were coming. Every hour she stayed made it harder to just give up and go to bed. But it was hard to keep her eyes open, and the monastery was so empty after dark, and her fingers were getting so, so cold as she sat on the wall waiting for nothing –

“Petra?”

Petra was relieved to discover she could turn towards the sound of the voice – around hour three she had begun to worry she would stay frozen like that forever. The figure was shadowy, and she squinted as Ashe came into view. He had his bow slung carelessly over one shoulder and the same jacket he wore to class every day. She wondered if he was as cold as she was.

Ashe took a few steps closer, hesitantly. Petra realized she should have said something, but his face broke into the same smile of recognition he flashed at her whenever she walked into the Blue Lions classroom.

“It is you! Wow, sorry, I didn’t recognize you with all the – um – that’s a very nice hat, Petra,” he said quickly.

“You are out with lateness, Ashe,” Petra said, and she tried to smile at him, because he’d smiled at her, even though she wasn’t having a very good evening, and there wasn’t any snow. “I hope you will be going to bed without much delaying.”

“Ah! Yeah, I was on night watch, but just the first shift. All quiet!” Ashe gave a small laugh as he said it. He grabbed an arrow from his quiver and spun it between his fingers. Ashe had a lot of nervous energy. Petra had noticed it almost as soon as she’d joined the Lions. He couldn’t sit still without having to do something. Watching him made her more antsy than four hours of sitting alone had. “What about you?” he asked. The arrow flipped around his index finger three times before he caught it. “On guard duty for the gardens?”

“Annette and Mercedes are telling me that it will be snowing tonight,” Petra explained. She realized that probably didn’t answer his question, so she added, “I would like to be seeing that; it would be very new for me.”

“Oh, that’s right! I guess . . . probably not a lot of snow in Brigid, huh?” Ashe asked. Petra shook her head. Ashe hesitated, then took a step towards the wall. “Want some company? I didn’t realize we were going to get snow tonight,” he said, and Petra wondered, hopefully, if maybe he’d stayed up late to watch the first snowfall at some point in his life, as well.

“I would be liking that greatly,” Petra said, and Ashe pushed himself up on the wall next to her before she could say anything more. They sat in silence for a few moments as he scrambled into place, setting his bow and quiver on the wall beside him, but Petra could feel his eyes on her after a few breaths.

“You know,” he said shyly. “You probably don’t need to stare at the sky while you wait. You’ll notice when it starts.”

Petra blushed and looked back down at her feet. The hat slid awkwardly over her eyes. “If it is starting at all,” she murmured, kicking one boot against the wall.

“Yeah, snow’s pretty unpredictable,” Ashe said, as if that were something everyone knew. He snuck a glance over at her again. “I hope you won’t be . . . too disappointed if we don’t get any tonight. It’s pretty late.” He said it gently, and for some reason, Petra felt her throat tighten to hear him say it.

“I am sure I’ll be seeing it before I go back to Enbarr,” she said, staring steadfastly at her feet. “It’s just –” she frowned, and stared harder, and felt Ashe lean closer.

“It’s just what?” he asked. “Is everything alright, Petra?”

“It’s just being so cold here!” she finally said, crossing her arms and hugging herself for warmth. “I thought I would be fine, having so much cold, if I was seeing the snow for the first time. But there is no snow, and they were telling me it would be too cold, and I wasn’t believing them and I should have had sleep for hours now and –”

It was movement that cut her off, not anything Ashe said. She wasn’t even sure why she had said so much – he had told her already he’d been working all night, he probably wanted to go to bed himself. But she looked over at him and he already had his hooded jacket halfway pulled over his head. Petra reached out quickly and grabbed his arm, and he blinked back at her, peering out from under his jacket.

“What’s up?” he said, his voice slightly muffled, his hands stuck over his head awkwardly.

“Ashe, aren’t you needing that?” Petra asked.

Ashe blushed, and struggled to reverse course, pulling at his jacket and trying to bring his arms back down. “I just thought – well – you said you were cold, so maybe you could . . . have this,” he said, his voice trailing off more and more with every word as he looked at Petra, in her three jackets piled on top of each other.

“Ashe, I am already wearing many jackets,” Petra said, smiling at him. She suspected he already realized this, but she wasn’t sure what else to say. “You are kind to lend me your hands, but I am not thinking another is more warmth.”

“Well . . . if you don’t want my jacket, is there anything I can do?” Ashe asked. “I can’t make it snow, but, um, if you want anything.”

“I want . . .” Petra paused. What did she want? Why was she even here?

Ashe stared at her, his eyes practically the color of the cold, bright moon nestled in the clouds behind him. He waited.

“I am wanting it to not be so cold. And I am wanting to know when it is going to be snowing,” Petra said. “And I’m wanting to not . . . be here.”

It was a stupid thing to say, she realized, because there was no reason she had to be sitting there, on that garden wall. No one had made her; people had tried to stop her. But she didn’t mean _here_ , not in the sense of that wall in particular and she didn’t know what other word she could use for it.

Luckily, Ashe seemed to understand anyway.

“Did you stay up to watch the sky when you were in Brigid?” he asked softly. “Rain storms, or something like that?”

Petra nodded, and then shook her head, and then wasn’t sure what question she was answering. “Not for rain,” she said, her voice slightly breaking. “But we would be watching the stars sometimes. They fell, into the sea. We would go together to find them falling.”

“How did you know?” Ashe asked. “When to look for them?”

Petra looked up at the sky. It was covered in clouds now, she couldn’t see a single star, and even the moon was obscured. “We had men who were studying the skies,” she explained. “The sky’s patterns are repeated. They could always tell.”

“I see,” Ashe said. After a long pause, he added, “I’m sorry the snow is so unpredictable.”

Petra tried to smile, to match the way he shone, even when it was cloudy. “Most things are,” she said. “I am just wanting it . . . to not be so cold.”

She felt Ashe’s fingers wrap around hers, clumsy and somehow distant through the thick woolen fabric of the mittens. She looked down at his hand, encased in his own leather hunting gloves, and then up at him, and he flinched slightly at her surprised expression.

“Is this okay?” he asked quickly. “I mean, since you won’t take my jacket – and I can’t, um, I can’t change the weather.”

“It is okay,” Petra said back to him. She could barely feel his hands between the layers of wool and leather, and her fingers were suddenly uncomfortably pressed together in the ridiculous design of Mercedes’ mittens. She added, “I feel much more warmly, this way,” and she meant it.

Ashe’s smile in return was bright and warm against a dark and cloudy sky. And in the end, Petra missed the first flakes of snow that finally fell against her hair because she was distracted by the way his eyes looked like stars.

**Author's Note:**

> I write a lot about snow because I went to college in Michigan and we were all very excited about it in October and extremely over it by May.
> 
> Personally I think Petra hates snow but loves snowball fights, but I could be convinced otherwise.
> 
> To convince me otherwise,[ find me on twitter. ](https://twitter.com/Rose3Writes)


End file.
